Bohemian Heart

by Dalessandro, James

  Colleen said, "Wow." I hadn't heard a bona fide wow in a long time, but I had to agree with her appraisal.

  I jerked my head for her to follow me. Wine bottle and glasses in hand, I led her up the back stairs to my loft, where she remarked on my view of the bridge.

  "I was surprised to see you in the courtroom," Colleen said. "I guess I was surprised to see you from my bedroom window this morning."

  "I wanted to see how difficult it would be for a burglar to gain entrance from the wall. It isn't. I went to court because I knew they'd put John Naftulin on the stand to establish the crime and the crime scene. He's a good cop with a bad habit of talking too much. I was hoping he might say something he shouldn't have, give me a clue, an idea about where to start looking." My subsequent silence said he hadn't.

  I set the table near the picture window, put out two dishes of antipasti I'd bought at Molinari's the day before, and filled our wineglasses. I told her I had a lot of questions and I wanted some answers. She nodded but said that once dinner arrived we'd stop, because it was difficult for her to eat when she was upset. I agreed.

  I figured I had a good twenty-five minutes until the food arrived so I started with the two things most on my mind. First I asked about William's affair and how she found out.

  "I got an anonymous phone call from a very nervous-sounding guy one day. He said his girlfriend was having an affair with my husband, he wanted it stopped, and he wanted money or he was going to the newspapers. After I caught my breath I told him I didn't care what he did. By this point in our relationship William and I were through anyway. I didn't give a damn if he was embarrassed in the newspapers. It was just a matter of time until he and I got divorced."

  "You could have used it against him, tried to break your prenuptial, sweeten your settlement," I suggested.

  "I'm not a blackmailer, Frank. I can't live my life like that."

  "How long was this before William was killed?" I asked.

  "He was killed in mid-September, let me see . . . it was late July. It was the afternoon of July twenty-eighth. Six weeks."

  "Did you find out who the girl was, or if it was even true?"

  "It was true all right. I have a friend who was an investigative journalist for Mother Jones magazine, Alice Stein. I called and told her about it, asked her if there was a way I could find out if it was true. I didn't want to go to a private detective. I've always thought they were kind of sleazy."

  "Just the good ones," I told her. She smiled and went on. "Alice followed William from his office one evening to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. She actually rode up in the elevator with him and watched him enter a suite. Then she ran downstairs and rented the suite next door.

  "She'd brought a listening device, the kind you attach to the wall, and she tape recorded what went on." When Colleen hesitated I urged her to continue, sparing no details. I wanted to know who was the S and who was the M, if they took turns, if they had sex or just did the rawhide follies. I told Colleen different call girls had different rules, some were dominant, some submissive, some were switches. Most S&M professionals would not have sex with clients, although the Farragut cash might change that. Knowing the woman's peculiarities might make it easier to find her.

  "They definitely had sex. William had her dress up all in leather, thigh-high boots, black leather collar around her neck, black wrist and ankle restraints. Then he made her bend over a table, fastened her ankles to the table legs and her hands to the far end and whipped her with a riding crop, then spanked her with his bare hand. He made her count each stroke, made her beg him to fuck her. And then he did."

  She was very cool about it, almost unemotional.

  "Who left the room first?"

  "He did. He told her to wait a half hour at least. She made a phone call, I figured it must have been the boyfriend, although we couldn't hear his voice over the tape. She called him Hawk.

  "She lied to him, told him she was at a girlfriend's house. He obviously didn't believe her. He wanted to know if she was with William again and demanded that she give him the number so he could call back and verify where she was. They got in quite a row and she hung up on him."

  "Sounds like this girl was an amateur."

  "Yeah, that's what Alice said. I still have the tape, if you want to listen to it."

  "Yes, I do. Did Alice see the girl or get a license plate number or anything?"

  "She rode down in the elevator with the girl, got a good look at her, but the girl left in a cab."

  "How did he pay her?"

  "Before they started he told her the money was in a drawer in an envelope. He told her to count it, to let him know if it was a 'fair price', which is just like him, and she said yes."

  "Description?"

  "Five ten, blond, blue eyes, big boobs. A scar over the right corner of her mouth. I guess the boyfriend must have found out, because a week or so later anonymous messages started arriving at every newspaper in town. That's how all the rumors and gossip got started. The caller had enough details to make some of the newspapers print the story."

  "I remember. Zane Neidlinger investigated and thought it was true. He said the girl had been seen at a number of hotels coinciding with the appearance of William, but no one knew who she was. Did the police or any of Sherenian's people ever find the girl or the boyfriend?"

  "Calvin said it was better not to tell the police, that a private detective could find her just as easily and that we would be able to do things the cops couldn't in order to find out if she was involved. But the private detectives he hired never found her. They were all from the same agency, the Hayden Phillips Agency. Do you know it?"

  I knew Hayden Phillips, a real swell guy. He was as low on the scale of evolution as you could get and still chew your lunch. He had the ego of an overpaid right fielder, the scruples of a washed-up movie producer, the heart of a five-dollar pimp.

  He'd been a Treasury agent who left after twenty years to open his own agency. He got his start kidnapping children in custody cases, doping them up for the plane ride home. He also hired male models to seduce rich, lonely women, then kicked in the doors of their hotels and photographed them doing the grunt-and-groan so their husbands could use the photos against them in divorce cases.

  He became so successful that his phone number was unlisted. He worked strictly for big law firms like Sherenian's.

  The fact that they'd been unable to find the girl and her blackmailing boyfriend bothered me quite a bit. Phillips had some of the top P.I.s in the city working for him; the girl and her boyfriend were either long gone or dead.

  "Has Calvin brought any of this out in strategy discussions? Has he thought of using this as a potential sidetrack, that a blackmail attempt was made and rebuffed?"

  "Calvin said it was just another story that I couldn't prove." Calvin might have been right about that one.

  I asked her about her affair. She seemed a little more uneasy about that, but not ashamed. It was getting tougher to sit across from her when every move she made seemed erotic. Her long fingers wrapped around her wineglass, and the glow of the lit-up city outside the window touched the angles of her face as she talked. Hearing the stories of her sexual escapades with another man was not goingto be easy. Being professional was getting more difficult by the minute.

  "I met Tommy Rivera when I got involved in a nonprofit organization called SOHO: Save Our Homes, Ourselves. They were buying up old and condemned buildings south of Market Street, teaching poor and homeless people to renovate them, then renting them to the people who did the work for very low prices.

  "It seemed like Tommy had his life straightened out pretty well when I met him," Colleen continued. "I thought the program was a great one because it gave people skills and jobs and places to call their own. I started running into Tommy at parties and fundraisers, and he was all charm and warmth.

  "I knew he liked me from the beginning, but he was cool, never made a move. I must admit that that intrigued me. He's very goo
d-looking. Anyway, I ran into him about two weeks after I'd found out about William and the Bondage Queen. We went to lunch. I had two glasses of wine, I hadn't made love with my husband in a long time." She hesitated, for the first time looking a little troubled.

  "I'd never cheated on William before, but our marriage was really on the rocks, and I was still stunned by his affair. I was lonely and miserable. Tommy and I lasted a month, and at the time it seemed like one of the more enjoyable mistakes I'd ever made."

  "When did it end?"

  "A few weeks before William was killed. I found out that Tommy was living with another woman. Can you beat that? I guess I deserved it, a two-timer being two-timed. He'd also grown demanding, and possessive."

  "How did he react when you broke it off?"

  "First he tried pleading, softening his attitude. When that didn't work, he just went nuts, calling at all hours, screaming that I just used him to do my husband's 'dirty work' for him. When I was arrested he called and offered his help if I needed it, but I didn't care. I was too hysterical to listen. A few months later he stopped by and tried to blackmail me, just like I told you."

  "He concocted a story about you offering him money to have your husband killed?"

  "Yes."

  The door buzzer announced the arrival of dinner, a welcome relief. I went downstairs and brought the food back up, and we ate slowly, lingering as though neither of us wanted it to end. The moon laid a dazzling amber ribbon across the Bay, the lights danced in the city below as we talked and watched each other without any fears or reservations. I asked about her life growing up in the San Joaquin Valley.

  "After father ran away, my mother married the next man who asked her, a guy with a sixth-grade education who had a hard time holding a job. Outside of Bakersfield, a thirty-two-year-old woman with four daughters is not exactly A-list marriage material."

  "Then they proceeded to have two more girls. Every year or so we had a family picture taken—his brother was always taking pictures—and you could see each sister wearing the same dress or blouse that the next bigger one had worn the year before."

  "We were like slaves on this farm, bailing hay, mucking out stalls, you name it. I remember when I was seven . . ." Her voice had gotten a little husky, and she took a sip of her wine. "I'd never had a toy of my own. I shamed my mother into making me one. You know what it was? A bicycle wheel. She nailed two sticks together into a T and all summer long I pushed that wheel with those sticks and thought it was the coolest thing."

  "Then when I was fifteen, my stepfather made me stay home from a church picnic. He took me into the barn, said I was growing so fast he wanted to take some photos to remember me by. He was drinking, and I could just tell what he had in mind, but I was afraid of him."

  "One thing led to another . . . He told me to unbutton my blouse, then take it off, and every time I refused he got angrier. Then he grabbed me and started squeezing my breasts. I pushed him away and he slapped me and grabbed me again. I went crazy. That's when I bit the tip of his earlobe off and ran to a neighbor's house. I'd been keeping my baby-sitting money there so he wouldn't find it."

  "A friend's older brother drove me to Salinas to catch the bus. I got to San Francisco that night, fifteen years old, with sixty-two dollars and the clothes on my back. Ten years later I married one of the ten richest men in the city. When I finally found out what sort of man my husband really was, he didn't seem a whole lot better than my stepfather. Just wealthier."

  We looked at each other for a long minute.

  Colleen wiped a tear from her eye. "I read in an old newspaper clipping that you speak nine languages," she said, changing the subject.

  "That was a misprint. I speak five, six if you count two dialects of Chinese. It was pretty simple. My mother was from the Aosta Valley in Italy, where they speak French and Italian, so I had French, Italian, and English since birth. That made studying Spanish in high school very easy. I learned Mandarin and Cantonese from my friends growing up in the neighborhood. I picked up a few hundred words of German and Japanese, but not much more."

  "William's mother told me that there has been a feud between your family and the Farraguts going back almost one hundred years. Is that true?"

  "It's not much of a feud, really. It amounts to the Fagens trying to put the cuffs on the Farraguts for all the miserable shit they've done to people, with the Farraguts always winning. Do you want to hear how it started?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "The founder of the San Francisco Farragut clan," I began, "was the first William. He was a Welsh immigrant who got a real break during the Gold Rush. When all those boats starting arriving with thousands of would-be prospectors, even the crews jumped ship to strike it rich. Yerba Buena became a ghost port filled with abandoned wooden schooners."

  "Farragut took over a number of the ships with the consent of the city and turned them into floating general stores, supplying tools, hardtack, maps, everything the miners needed. But he also had a soft heart, and he made a habit of extending credit to hard-luck cases and donating money to orphanages and charities. He died when William the Second was only sixteen, and within a few years, the son had started up where the father left off, minus a few unbusiness-like personality traits."

  "William the Second, the first Farragut born in San Francisco, was the bad seed, the real architect of their little empire. He saw to it that compassion and charity became dirty words in the family vocabulary."

  "He built his father's trading and supply business to its limit, then turned his attention to the city's other growth industry, construction. Even when the gold vanished, the population in San Francisco grew because of the town's wild reputation and because of the Bay, which drew shipping and commerce from all over the World."

  "William the Second called in all the bad debts his father had on the books from failed miners who'd returned to the city looking for work. He made them pay off their tabs by working for Farragut Construction."

  "He got land grants in exchange for bribes and kickbacks. He built stores, hotels, and cheap housing. He owned the tool supply company, a cement factory, and built a lumber mill. He bought up failed land claims in Santa Cruz County to the south and raped the land for its timber, leaving behind piles of slash and garbage."

  "With hundreds of destitute men working for him twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for slave wages, his labor costs were reduced to almost nothing. Willy the Second was unstoppable."

  "As if that weren't enough, he bought and bullied as many city officials as he could, to keep building codes to a minimum, paid inspectors not to enforce the codes that did exist, and was one of the first to hire goon squads to beat and murder union organizers when the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, tried to improve the conditions of the workers. For the above-named humanitarian efforts, he received numerous citizenship awards from a succession of well-paid-for mayors. Eugene Schmitz, mayor when the earthquake hit, was the worst. Every morning people willing to pay bribes for city contracts used to line up outside his office, the Farraguts owned him."

  "When the quake hit, the houses Farragut built south of Market Street collapsed. There are some great pictures of the old Victorians leaning against each other like drunks. The immigrant tenants found out the hard way that their houses didn't have poorly constructed foundations—they had no foundations at all."

  "A small mob of hysterical Italian and Armenian immigrants, several of whom had lost family members in the destruction, marched over to Farragut's home. There were rumors, never confirmed, that they were carrying a long piece of rope with a noose custom-tailored for William the Second's neck at the end."

  "Somebody tipped Farragut off. He had several freelance Neanderthals and a half dozen corrupt cops surrounding him when they arrived. A screaming match started, and Farragut had the goon squad wade in and start busting heads with clubs and baseball bats."

  "When Farragut left by the back entrance, he was confronted by a h
ysterical young Armenian whose infant son had been crushed to death when his rented flat collapsed. Farragut got a little incensed at the man's accusations, so he borrowed a pistol from one of his goons and shot the man between the eyes."

  "A twenty-year-old rookie cop saw the whole thing through a backyard fence. When he tried to arrest Farragut, two older police officers stopped him."

  "Then, when this rookie cop filed a report with his superiors, he got called into the mayor's office. The mayor, the chief of police, and a few others told him his vision had been impaired, his recollections inaccurate, and that a quick dose of amnesia would not only preserve his job but keep him from being prosecuted for filing false charges against a man of the stature of William the Second."

  "The rookie cop was my grandfather, Byron Fagen."

  "And so began the long and abiding love affair between the Fagens and the Farraguts," she said.

  I nodded. We sat for a long while in silence, staring out at the city, glancing at each other. She was easily the most beautiful woman I'd ever known.

  At midnight I called for a cab to pick Colleen up at the mouth of the alley a block below my house.

  We stood in the alley's shadows, Colleen's face shadowed inside the hood of her coat. Turning to face me in the dim light, she said thank you and mumbled something about almost forgetting her problems for awhile.

  She brushed the hood back. Her eyes played over my face for a few long seconds, making me a little uneasy. I fought it off and stared back into them, a brilliant jade even under the streetlights. I made no move toward her.

  She put one long, warm hand along the side of my neck, and then she kissed me, the light smell of perfume stirring me, the warmest, wettest, softest kiss I'd been given in a very long time. I kissed her back, making no attempt to put my arms around her and hold her.

  My heart pounded, I felt a little softening in the knees. She pulled back, smiled, then turned to see the cab turning the corner. She thanked me again for everything.

  I opened the door for her and gave the driver the address as she got into the cab. Exchanging a last look, we said good night. I stood watching as the cab pulled away and disappeared down Greenwich Street.